Final Paper Proposal

Topic(s):

Digital Storytelling, Online Narratives, Citizen Journalism, YouTube, User-Submitted, on-the-ground

Format:

Paper

Thesis question(s): How has user-generated/user-submitted Internet news content changed the conventional media landscape? Are these changes for better or for worse? What potential effects could this have on the conglomerated media ownership structure? How does the tension between accuracy and immediacy manifest itself?

Two sources on history and how they relate:

1. An immediate, up-to-date news source that was on the ground where the action was happening - "Radio was instantaneous. Furthermore, print could never match the immediacy of Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London as German bombs ripped through the city."
http://www.ablongman.com/samplechapter/0205387012.pdf

Folkerts, Jean, and Stephen Lacy. "The media in your life." (2004).

2.Television as the most up-to-date visual news source by new type of journalist - "...had changed by the 1960s into aggressive, full-color reporting with extensive interpretation and analysis by members of a new and nontraditional school of journalism. The latter felt and still feel that their responsibility is "to discover truth, not merely facts. Reporters, denying their very name, are encouraged to give their own subjective analyses of events.... The Tet Offensive during the Vietnam war put on television for all to see:  The Tet offensive newsreel footage was 24 hours old by the time it had been processed for home consumption. If Tet occurred today, the news would be transmitted instantaneously."
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1982/jan-feb/baldwin.html

Baldwin, N. B. "Strategy and the Social Dimension in the 1980s." Air University Review (1982).

Two sources on theory and how they relate:

1. Ch. 1 of Image Ethics in the Digital Age - with digital technology's immediacy, the news is constantly updating, so there are no longer "big images" that have the same widespread impact and recognizability like photos of the past did (newspapers),

2. User-generated sites are surpassing the capabilities, speed and accuracy of the government and conventional mainstream media, especially in times of crisis:

"A continuously updated board of victim status and their current hospital sits atop a rolling update of critical news, including pictures, video, and essential information about the situation, making it quite possibly the quickest way to get essential news for those needing information on potential victims (more informative than the government websites and local news channels). The incredible outpouring of eyewitness journalism and support has turned the humble news aggregator into an impressive source of information in the midst of a national crisis."
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/20/reddit-aurora-shooting/ 

"At the same time that the Iranian regime was closing the country off from the outside world, a group of disconnected digital activists who were watching with horror realized that they had the technical chops to try to get information out from under the regime’s lockdown. They began setting up proxy servers, receiving content and distributing videos and images to members of the international press, who were being denied access to the streets—or to the country."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/10/the-revolution-was-televised.html 

"Within hours, sometimes minutes of a demonstration, a clash or an atrocity, viewers saw clips disseminated all over the Internet via YouTube and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and Iranian Diaspora sites such as Iranian.com Tehran Bureau, Gooya, and the Persian blogger's site Balatarin.com."
p. 120

Kamalipour, Yahya R. Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election Uprising in Iran. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.

How you got there/Problems/Issues you see: (OPTIONAL)
Maybe find better examples of strictly citizen journalism? Letters, etc.

Week 8: Thoughts on Ch. 7 of "Image Ethics in the Digital Age"

"The information infrastructure makes private infringement of [intellectual property] rights vastly easier to carry out and correspondingly more difficult to detect and prevent. As a result, individual standards of moral and ethical conduct, and individual perceptions of right and wrong, become more important." p. 145

Individual perception of right and wrong become more important. That could not be more true. I was discussing this with my friends, about which of us felt it was okay to illegally download  certain kinds of material. Personally, I have no qualms about illegally downloading anything - music, movies, textbooks, yu name it. If it's free and it's there, I'll do it. And I know I won't get caught, so who cares? Some of my friends felt differently, and felt that it is wrong. But their conscience has a price, and they end up paying, sometimes  ridiculous, amounts of money for media that they could easily get free. iTunes, Netflix and textbooks would be one example. I feel that nowadays, especially in the digital age that we live in, information is not contained - it is fluid, liquid and everywhere. Copyright laws are antiquated and to some extent pointless because they are broken all the time. The music, the data, and the video is everywhere, and you can't control its spread. In fact, my copy of Image Ethics in the Digital Age that I am looking at as I type this is a PDF scan that a friend made and emailed to me in an attachment. I know I'm not the only one it was sent to, and I sent it to a couple friends myself. You can no longer contain media, it's everywhere. And I think that copyright laws will only be ignored more and more as people wise up to more inexpensive ways of getting the media that they want. Everything you want on the internet is there; you just have to be able to find it.

Dave Grohl (lead singer of the Foo Fighters) on copyright:



Thom Yorke (Radiohead) on piracy:



Anti-piracy circa 1992:

Week 7: Thoughts on Ch. 5 of "Image Ethics in the Digital Age"

"The public absorbed all of these dirty secrets without seeming to turn against the miscreants; all of the "exposed" members of Congress were reelected... and, of course, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton failed to remove him from office." p. 109

Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner, David Petraeus. The list of US politicians caught up in a sex scandal is a long one, and these are just the ones in my lifetime that I can name off the top of my head! Internationally, the scandals and infidelity of politicians Silvio Berlusconi, Strauss-Kahn, and Nicolas Sarkozy, also caused a stir. But it seems that infidelity and sex scandals are much less of a big deal abroad than they are in the US - citizens of those countries continue to re-elect politicians, despite how much dirty laundry laundry is aired out, using the argument that their personal lives are of little consequence, especially if they are a good leader. It doesn't seem to be quite the same in the United States. Often, these scandals seem to happen to politicians running on a campaign that totes the importance of family values, making the said politician coming off as a liar and a hypocrite. It seems to me that the private and personal as the public and political is more intertwined in US politics, and thus potentially more damaging. Yet after each scandal, people begin to question whether or not who their congressman is sleeping with actually matters in terms of hard effects - does it really affect them?

Increasingly, people are starting to feel that it doesn't, and politicians are bouncing back stronger than ever from these scandals, as evidenced by the Anthony Weiner campaign for mayor and Mark Sanford's congressional reelection bid. (More on that here: http://online.wsj.com/article/AP7d2aaaad145e4f119b4b2c9353398395.html )

Week 6: Thoughts on Ch. 2 of "Image Ethics in the Digital Age"

"In order to demonstrate their abiding commitment to honesty, photojournalists, news editors, and news publishers have begun to institute a professional codes, standards governing the use of digital imaging technology." (p. 33)

Essentially, the chapter goes through the different debates as to what constitutes acceptable, ethical and allowable forms of image manipulation. Journalists debate over how much an image can be changed and still be called 100% accurate. Note here the use of "accurate" - one can't say truthful because truth is subjective, and "representational" doesn't work either because a photo can represent something, but it might not be the thing or event itself, merely a stand-in.

I took journalism in middle and high school, both for newspaper and yearbook. The rules that we adhered to were that we could only adjust the following afterwards on a computer:

• resolution (dpi, or dots per inch)
• color correction
• contrast and saturation
• greyscale

Strictly prohibited were:

• cropping (can change meaning, as well as make it difficult to upload into the spread
• horizontal flipping (at times tempting when subjects weren't facing the gutter)
• airbrushing (the staff was often tempted to do this to their own photos - pimply mug shots!)
• editing out of any kind

The one exception when people were edited out was for the annual senior photo when the whole class assembles. Invariably, there was always someone who wore a shirt with a swear word or flipped off the camera, or who was not a senior, who had to be deleted. And in that case, our yearbook advisor did the photoshopping. 

In high school, our #1 ranked nationally newspaper The Nexus had plenty of digital manipulation, but it was, as Chapter 2 says, very clear that the photo had been combined with digital art. We had a byline for the photograph, and one for what we termed "photo illustration." It was always very clear, usually combining visual art or a computer graphic of some kind with a photo. As far as manipulating images with the camera's own functions as you were taking the picture, everything was fair game for us. Motion blur, zoom, depth of field, tilt, black and white, strange angles or apertures, you name it. Our newspaper focused on photojournalism as stories and narratives, so I think we were allowed to be more adventurous and artistic when it came to taking interesting photos to tell a story. 

As far as policy, I think a most hands-off approach as possible is best. If the camera can do it in the moment (like the hula hoop motion blur example) I think it should be allowed. Minimal color correction or saturation or contrast can be tweaked to improve image quality. But I don't think that things like focus should be messed with. Even cropping should be used sparingly, as it can greatly change the meaning of a photo, merely by surrounding context and atmosphere. 

Here's a photo I've always liked, commonly captioned "What Media Tells Us." Relates to cropping:

And another one about cropping:

And a link to a fascinating but terrifying album of photos showing EXTREME but low-tech photo manipulation by the Soviets during the war: http://imgur.com/gallery/GmPdh